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Sunday, May 3, 2015

#88: The Banner Saga: Building on an Idea

Every
once in a while, I play a game that challenges some basic notions of
game design. Usually, these do not turn out to be very good, as these
notions exist for a reason. On the other hand, they sometimes open up
new possibilities for what game developers can do. The Banner Saga is
an example of the latter. A hybrid of the Oregon Trail and classic
RPGs, The Banner Saga takes place in a setting heavily inspired by
classic Nordic myths. What I want to focus on is a single choice that
the developers made regarding the combat. This choice informed the
rest of the combat mechanics, and restructured the game in a way that
I have certainly never seen before.

In
The Banner Saga, the developers made the decision that Health and
Damage output would be governed by the same stat. Each fighter has
two major stats: Strength and Armor. When attacking another unit, one
can either chip away at their Armor, or deliver damage to their
Strength. The exact amount of Strength damage is equal to the
aggressor's Strength, minus the Armor of the assaulted party. If
Strength reaches 0, then the unit will be incapacitated, unable to
participate any further in the battle. In other words, whenever
somebody is attacked, not only are they that much closer to defeat,
but their offensive capability is reduced. This one change to the
usual RPG dynamic has a noticeable impact on the rest of combat.

The
first of these changes is that players are encouraged to avoid
outright killing targets in favor of crippling them and moving on to
the next one. While fighting, player and enemy turns are interleaved.
Players can determine the order in which their units act, but after
every ally action, the enemy moves one of their units, followed by
the next ally unit, and so on and so forth. Enemies with low Strength
are less likely to be to do any significant damage, especially when
friendlies still have Armor. As a result, leaving a weak foe alive
means that units with more Strength will take longer to act, since
the game still needs to cycle through the weakened enemies first.
This extra breathing room makes it much easier to focus on other
units, until it is finally time to start cleaning house and removing
opposition. I used this very thought process myself on many large
enemies, including the game's final boss. By leaving his subordinates
low on Strength, I could keep him at bay long enough to finish him
before he had the chance to take out too many of my own forces.

The
other behavioral shift I noticed during my time with The Banner Saga
is that I played a noticeably more defensive game than I typically
do. Whenever a party member of mine had taken Strength damage, I
always winced because I knew that the fight would be made that much
more difficult with their reduced damage output. Because of this, I
found myself often grouping my forces together, concentrating all of
their attacks on a single unit at a time, keeping them out of range
of other units. This allowed my party to maintain their strong
offensive capabilities for most of a fight. Though this strategy
might be seen as slower and less skillful in other tactical RPGs, The
Banner Saga makes it one of the fastest and most effective tactics.
Enemies do have AoE attacks, but the risk of spreading units apart
too much is always there. Unless some degree of caution is taken,
units can crippled just with a few well aimed Strength attacks. Given
that the plot is about a group of people trying to stay alive against
all odds, this appears to be intentional and a nice way to immerse
players into the atmosphere of the game.

\The
Banner Saga takes a lot from well known tactical RPGs. However, the
choice to take health and damage output, and merge them into the same
statistic is one that I have personally never seen before. Of course,
there are many other ways in which the game stands out, making its
worth known, but this is the one that stood out to me as something
that other designers might be able to gain inspiration from. I would
definitely recommend taking a look at The Banner Saga is you are
looking for something different in your strategy RPGs.